


To Not Make Deals

by LadyBrooke



Category: The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-02
Updated: 2020-06-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:20:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24501487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyBrooke/pseuds/LadyBrooke
Summary: She had decided long ago that her mother’s fate would not be hers, and her brother would not die due to the Corrigan either.
Kudos: 2
Collections: Hurt/Comfort Bingo - Round 10





	To Not Make Deals

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the May H/C Bingo challenge, prompt deals with demons.

The Lady of the Castle led her horse carefully through the forest. 

It would not do to be seen as too eager by the witch. 

It would also not do to take so long that she missed her chance to rescue her brother. 

It was not that her brother was not intelligent enough to know to not make a deal with the Corrigan. He knew better, but his drive for revenge had always been stronger than his sense, and on their seventeenth birthday he had stormed from the gates, determined to have his revenge before the seventeenth anniversary of their parents’ deaths. 

She had begged him to stay, only to be ignored. 

She had chased after him, only for her maids to grasp onto her dress and keep her back when her brother galloped away on his own horse, claiming that the Lord must be allowed to do as he wished, as though that had not been what led their parents to their deaths. 

Her brother had not returned that night, nor the next day. She had bid the rest of the castle’s inhabitants to carefully keep watch, and had then sneaked through the hallways and out a window until she could reach the stables. 

It was not as though she could just let her brother die, when it was only the two of them left. After all, she had sworn as a child that she would not end as her mother had, lost to another’s deal with the Dey witch, even if it was her brother and not her husband who made the deal. 

“Brother! Brother,” she cried as she rode the horse through the woods, carefully keeping to the path they had traced on their father’s maps so long ago. “Do not challenge her, you cannot win.” 

She did not know if he was still close enough to hear, but she did not stop crying out for him until she had reached the cave herself. 

There he stood, pale but still alive, staring at the entrance. His horse was tied to a tree nearby, and she quickly led her own there, slipping from his back and tying him to the same tree. 

Then she rushed forward, until she could grasp her brother’s arms and turn him to face her, looking at the tears on his face and his frown. 

“Tell me,” she demanded, looking then to the cave’s entrance. “Tell me you did not speak to her.”

Her brother was silent. 

“Tell me!” 

“Nay! Nay, I promise,” he finally said. “I intended to challenge her, but I heard your voice through the woods as I made my way here.”

“Good,” she said, closing her eyes briefly. “Good. We will return to the castle, and I shall not lose you as well.”

“You shall not.” 

She led him back to the horses, waiting until he had taken his place on his own before she slipped onto her own. 

She did not look back at the cave as they left.


End file.
